Photo Credit: Liz Ratzloff
By LNS Co-Director Liz Ratzloff
I recently attended the Climate Underground conference hosted by chef Alice Waters and former Vice President Al Gore at his farm in Carthage, Tennessee. The Climate Reality Project’s conference convened farmers, scientists, chefs, non-profit staff, and others to talk about how regenerative farming practices can decrease emissions in the agricultural sector and help create more resilient farms that can better withstand the severe storms brought about by global warming.
At this conference, we heard from farmworker leaders that farm workers lack the basic protections held by workers in other sectors like workers’ compensation, health insurance, and the right to join a union. Only a few states, like California and New York, have enacted any legislation protecting the organizing, collective bargaining, and unionization rights of agricultural workers.
The United Farm Workers (UFW) has contracts protecting thousands of workers and fights for legislative and regulatory reforms on issues like worker protections, pesticides, and immigration reform. Teresa Romero, the President of the United Farm Workers, highlighted how the effects of climate change, like extreme heat, pesticide use, and flooding are harming farm workers and that a just transition in agriculture must center the essential workers feeding our country.
Another farm worker organization, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), has developed a different model of farmworker action. CIW is a worker center that runs food justice campaigns and actively fights forced labor and worker exploitation through direct actions that have successfully won industry wide wage increases and worker protections. CIW’s Fair Food Program is an agreement between workers, growers, and retailers to require that growers comply with a code of conduct. The CIW is credited with helping to end modern-day slavery and forced labor. Those of us in the labor climate movement who are preparing to fight back against an authoritarian administration can learn from the fights that UFW and CIW have been fighting for decades.